Columbia French

12/17/2025

Warm congratulations go out to Laetitia Ndiaye on the successful defense of her dissertation, Writing and Seeing the World: language, movement and identity in Francophone literature and cinema.

12/09/2025

Access the on-line discussion December 12 from 2:00-3:00pm here -
https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/Dpy8ADwyTN2h6YnIipnDFA #/registration

The Rest Is Silence
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300181340/the-rest-is-silence/

11/20/2025

Join Columbia professor Joanna Stalnaker for an on-line mini-course on The Enlightenment’s Last Words: 3 one-hour sessions from 12-1pm ET on 12/4, 12/11 & 12/18. Use the discount code ENLIGHTENED40 for 40% off the course registration fee.
https://roundtable.org/live-courses/history/famous-last-words-enlightenment-philosophers-on-their-legacies

11/07/2025

Columbia News interviews Joanna Stalnaker for the Off the Shelf series, where she discusses her new book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, and shares what she is reading and would recommend, as well as who she would invite to the perfect dinner party.

Columbia News
What Would You Write if You Were Approaching Death?
https://news.columbia.edu/news/what-would-you-write-if-you-were-approaching-death

The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300181340/the-rest-is-silence/

10/21/2025

Joanna Stalnaker has been awarded the Isobel Grundy prize from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for her latest article, “Un avant-goût du néant: Madame du Deffand et Voltaire, deux philosophes face à la mort.” This article draws on her new book, The Rest Is Silence.

10/16/2025

✨ Come meet French Department faculty, students and alumni.
✨ Learn more about spring courses, majoring and minoring in French, study abroad, extra-curricular activities in French, and more.
✨ Brief presentations begin at 6:30pm, drop in anytime between 6:00 - 7:30pm.

10/16/2025

Do you want to teach or study in France after graduation?

Come learn about two exciting opportunities:
✨ TAPIF (Teaching Assistant Program in France)
✨ The Lafayette Fellowship: A prestigious new graduate scholarship for master’s-level study in France.

Hear from representatives of French Cultural Services, Inès Arcia and Fabrice Jaumont, and Professor Joanna Stalnaker (Director of Undergraduate Studies in French).

10/16/2025

Congratulations to Jeanne Devautour Choi on the successful defense of her doctoral dissertation, Writing in Décalage: Fractured Memory and Generational Distance in Diasporic Voices from Argentina and Viet Nam!

09/26/2025

Renate Mattar (PhD candidate in the Department of French with a certificate in Comparative Literature and Society) has been awarded the Contemporary Thought Archival Research Grant, a joint fellowship between the Columbia Paris Center and the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l'Edition Contemporaine). In continuation of her work on memory, archives and autobiography, she will conduct a residence at the IMEC and at Reid Hall, in the summer of 2026. This new project brings the Duras and Baudrillard archives into dialogue.

06/23/2025

The Department of French would like to congratulate Soraya Limare on the successful defense of her thesis entitled, "Transnational Afterlives of the Haitian Revolution: Between History and Fiction." Félicitations !

04/17/2025